Authors in History

Well ahead of the connections that grew between music and poetry during the hip-hop era, several generations of African-American poets drew on musical influences in their works. The writers associated with the politically oriented Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s were especially active in this regard, joining spoken words with blues and jazz in an attempt to create a distinctively African-American form of poetic expression. Sarah Webster Fabio, active later in her life in the movement’s San Francisco Bay Area epicenter, gained attention during that era. But she had formed her own style well in advance of these developments, doggedly pursuing chances to express herself while she dealt with the responsibilities of marriage and family.

Fabio was born Sarah Webster in Nashville, Tennessee, on January 20, 1928. She was one of six children. Her father, Thomas Jefferson Webster, took one of the most important paths that led African Americans out of poverty: he worked as a Pullman porter for the Southern Illinois Railroad. Between that job and a real estate business he operated on the side, the family had enough money to send their academically talented daughter to Atlanta’s Spelman College. She graduated from high school in 1943, when she was only 15.

At Spelman, Sarah Webster majored in English and history. She moved back to Nashville in the summer of 1945, possibly because she had met her future husband Cyril Fabio II, a dental student at Nashville’s Meharry Medical College. She enrolled at Nashville’s Fisk University and graduated in 1946, after just three years of college. In June of 1946, soon after her graduation, she and Cyril Fabio were married.

Cyril Fabio put his dentistry skills to work in the United States military, and he was soon stationed in Florida. The Fabio family grew quickly: one son, Cyril Leslie Fabio III, was born on January 30, 1947, and another son, Thomas Albert Fabio, was born in January of 1948. By that time the family had been able to move back to Nashville, but they shuttled between Tennessee and Florida for the next several years. When she could, Sarah Webster Fabio took classes at Nashville’s Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College (now Tennessee State University). A daughter, Cheryl Elisa Louse Fabio, was born in 1949, and the 21-year-old Fabio found herself juggling classwork, the needs of three children under five, and the demands of being the spouse of a military medical officer.

Higher education became an even more distant goal after the Fabios moved to West Germany, again as a result of Cyril’s military career, in 1953. All through the family’s travels, however, Sarah was writing poetry. Once she was back in the United States, she took graduate English classes at Wichita State University in Kansas. Two more children were born, daughter Renee Angela in 1955 and a third son, Ronald Eric, in 1956.

After Cyril Fabio left the military, the family moved to California and settled in Palo Alto, near San Francisco. After getting her five children into school and involved in activities outside the home, Sarah Webster Fabio was finally able to return to her own education. She enrolled at San Francisco State College (now University) in 1963, completing a master’s degree two years later. From 1965 to 1968 she taught at Merritt College, a community college in downtown Oakland. She also served as an instructor at the East Bay Skills Center, teaching language skills to inner-city young people, and in 1966 she attended the First World Festival of Negro Art in Dakar, Senegal.

The flowering of Fabio’s teaching career coincided with tremendous growth in African-American literary creativity in the late 1960s. The Black Arts Movement was a loosely connected group of creative figures with ties to political organizations, ranging from progressive to militant, that arose within the larger counterculture scene. Fabio’s tenure at Merritt College has been credited with helping to introduce the ideas of the Black Arts Movement to Bay Area students. Her first book of poetry, Saga of a Black Man, was published in 1968.

Soon Fabio’s poetry was being published in the most vigorous and widely read African-American literary journals of the day: Black World, the Journal of Black Renaissance, and Negro Digest. More prestigious teaching appointments came her way; she taught, lectured, and read her poetry often from 1968 to 1971 at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts. Her next two books, A Mirror, A Soul (1971) and Black Talk: Shield and Sword (1973) were issued by the nationally prominent Doubleday publishing company.

Fabio’s poems were collected in a host of anthologies of the early 1970s, including The Black Aesthetic (1971) and Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973). She also collected many of her own poems in a self-published seven-volume set entitled Rainbow Signs. The works in that collection included “Of Puddles, Worms, Slimy Things,” which ran through its basic text twice: once in standard English (“Pity the poor worm who dares go it alone,” read one line) and once in truncated, telegraphic words that suggested black speech (“Hv merci on d po wrm who dares go it alone”). Many of Fabio’s poems dealt with music or were inspired by it. One of her best-known poems, “Tribute to Duke,” paid homage to jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington.

Fabio taught at Oberlin College in Ohio from 1972 (the year she and Cyril Fabio divorced) to 1974. She recorded two albums in 1972 on the Folkways label, Boss Soul and Soul Ain’t, Soul Is. After enrolling once again in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in 1975 she began to exhibit symptoms of colon cancer. She moved to live with her daughter Cheryl in Pinole, California, and mother and daughter collaborated on the 1976 film Rainbow Black, which featured many of Fabio’s poems in musical settings. Fabio died in Pinole on November 7, 1979.

Although she was not the first poet to record with musical accompaniment (Nikki Giovanni’s Truth Is On Its Way gained wide success in 1971), it is perhaps for her musical efforts that Fabio is best remembered. In 1975 she recorded one volume of Rainbow Black with musical accompaniment as Jujus: Alchemy of the Blues, and in the late 1990s that recording became one of three counterculture jazz classics reissued by Britain’s BGP record label. The recording included Fabio’s tribute to jazz great John Coltrane, who himself died young in 1967. “Sweet songs, you said, were gonna come again, My Man/and didn’t they?” Fabio wrote. “I mean they jetted in on a ray of radiance like the sun/to shine on those in our midst and/the still unborn in this hour of our great need.”

Born on July 6, 1825 in Knox County, Tennessee, Falkner served in the Mexican War. When the Civil War began, Falkner raised a company of men and was made colonel in the Second Mississippi Infantry. Wounded at First Manassas, he was dropped at the April 1862 reorganization and election of officers. Later in the War, he raised a company of Mississippi cavalry.

Falkner was an author of poetry and novels. His most famous work was a novel, The White Rose of Memphis.

After the War, Falkner was prominent in Mississippi Reconstruction; he founded the Ship Island, Ripley, and Kentucky Railroad Company and a community that bears his name. In 1889 he was elected to the Mississippi legislature. On November 5, he was shot by a former business partner. He died the following day.

Falkner was the great-grandfather of author William Faulkner. Faulkner based his character Colonel John Sartoris upon him. At some point the family name was altered from Falkner to Faulkner.

Jesse Hill Ford was born in Troy, Alabama. In 1932, Ford’s father took a job with Upjohn Pharmaceutical Company, and the family moved to Nashville. Ford attended Montgomery Bell Academy, where he wrote for the school newspaper and edited the school annual during his senior year. Ford enrolled at Vanderbilt University in 1947, where he was mentored by Donald Davidson, a member of the Fugitive and Agrarian movements in Southern writing. After graduating in 1951, Ford entered the US Navy as an Ensign and served in Korea for two years. Ford then studied at the University of Florida under Andrew Lytle, another Agrarian, and earned his MA in 1955. Ford worked in public relations for the Tennessee Medical Association for two years and for the American Medical Association for seven months. He resigned in 1957 to write full-time, and he and his family moved to Humboldt, Tennessee, his wife’s hometown. In 1959, Ford sold his first short story to Atlantic Monthly and won the magazine’s “Atlantic First” award. His play, The Conversion of Buster Drumwright, was aired by the CBS Television Workshop in 1960. The following year, Ford published his first novel and won a Fulbright Scholarship to study and write in Norway.

When Ford returned to Humboldt, he began working on a new novel, based on the murder of a local man. The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, published in 1965, was very successful critically and financially, and, in 1966, Ford won a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction writing. By 1969, he had published a collection of short stories and a third novel and had co-written the screenplay for a movie version of The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones. When the movie was released in 1970, Ford and his family were subjected to vandalism and harassment. Late that year, Ford fatally shot a young black man trespassing on his property, believing that the man was there to harm his family. Although Ford was acquitted of murder charges, the publicity severely damaged his life and career. He left Humboldt and wrote screenplays, frequently without screen credit, to pay his bills. Ford was writer-in-residence at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, for the academic year 1977-78. From 1985 to 1992, he contributed occasional editorials to USA Today. In 1995, Ford developed depression after open-heart surgery, and he committed suicide the following June.

When a writer is labeled a “Southerner,” he is given an identity; he is linked to his region in a way that the Northerner or Easterner or Westerner is not. Flannery O’Conner once said that Southern writers are “stuck with” being Southern. If so, then the fact of Southern history that they’re stuck with is slavery. When Frances Gaither published Double Muscadine in 1949 she remarked, “I’ve been in slavery ten yairs.” She was referring to the decade spent in completing the three novels Double Muscadine, The Red Cock Crows (1944), and Follow the Drinking Gourd (1940), a trilogy of sorts dealing with slavery. “The lot of Negroes has always affected me poignantly,” Mrs. Gaither says. “Slavery, of course, was a great moral wrong. I think it’s very hard for people now to believe that decent people could permit it–and permit it to last.”

In her novels, however, Mrs. Gaither confronts not just the immorality of slavery, but the mystery that surrounds the whole subject. In one interview she observed: “The lot of Negroes in this country has always touched me. I have lived among them all my life; but for a long time the whole subject of our effect on one another seemed to me so painful, so obscure, that I did not dare broach it. I used to wonder if a white person could ever really know how a Negro felt. I still wonder.” Ultimately it is the lack of understanding between white and blacks, and the tragic consequences of this ignorance, that is the real subject of her three major novels. Frances Ormond Jones, the daughter of Paul Tudor and Annie Walker Smith Jones, was born 21 May 1889 in Somerville, Tennessee. Her maternal grandfather was a native of Maine, while her paternal grandfather was a cotton planter and slaveowner in Tennessee. Mrs. Gaither attributed her deep concern with the plight of Negroes, at least in part, to this mixture of “raw Yankee and slave-holding Southern.” Early in her childhood the family moved to Corinth, Mississippi. She received a B.A. degree in 1909 from the Industrial Institute and College for Women (now Mississippi University for Women) and in 1912 married Rice Gaither, a newspaperman. After living briefly in Mobile and Fairhope, Alabama, the Gaithers eventually settled in New York City where Mr. Gaither worked on the staff of the New York Times for many years.

From 1918 until her death on October 28, 1955, Mrs. Gaither produced, in addition to numerous reviews and short stories, several masques and pageants and a total of seven books, including a biography of La Salle and three children’s novels, all dealing with various aspects of Southern history. Indeed, history was her main field of interest, and each of her books is obviously a product of careful and exhaustive historical research. Her main concern was the historian’s concern: to understand and interpret the meaning of the past. And for Mrs. Gaither, understanding the institution of slavery in the antebellum South meant, first of all, debunking numerous myths, in particular the myth that plantation life in Mississippi and Alabama was all a matter of juleps, white columns, coquettes in frilly dresses and contented darkies singing in the cotton fields. In Follow the Drinking Gourd she describes life on an Alabama plantation in no such romantic terms. John Austen, a Georgia planter, is forced to move his family of slaves to a new location on Alabama after the old Georgia farmland has ceased to be productive and driven him into debt. But the project is ill-fated. Austen has to deal with an endless succession of problems: disease, unpredictable weather, incompetent overseers, lonesomeness and homesickness among the slaves, and a Yankee abolitionist who only increases their discontent with his talk about “freedom.” There is certainly no mansion with white columns on the plantation, just a cluster of rude log cabins. As for Southern belles, Lura, the bride-to-be of one of the overseers, with her bare feet, drab, dirty dress, and flapping sunbonnet, and Miss Maggie, the whore with “bright yellow hair” and “raddled old cheeks” who comes from a nearby town to marry another overseer, can hardly qualify as types of feminine pulchritude.

The popular romanticized view of the Old South, false as it is, has not, however, been imposed on the past by later generations, as one might think. According to Mrs. Gaither, the myth was very much alive in the minds of many white Southerners before the Civil War. And this is the important point. Many members of the planter aristocracy deluded themselves into believing in what amounted to a false code of chivalry that blinded them to unpleasant realities, which they could not or would not face. This is the realizastion that Adam Fiske comes to in The Red Cock Crows. Fiske is a Yankee school teacher who has come South to teach but who is banished when his mischievous ideas threaten to bring about a slave insurrection. In a crucial scene in the novel, Fiske unburdens himself to Fannie Dalton, whom he has been escorting since his arrival. Fannie “in her piled curls and crimped flounces” prefers “dreams to reality, believing all men chivalrous –all white men, all Southerners”:

The knightliest code, { Salus populi suprema lex }. It is all done, really, to safeguard the purity of Southern womanhood, which, it goes without saying, is the purest on earth. It is really for your protection, Fannie, that I am banished. Just like a page out of Sir Walter. I may not write you a letter. They told me they would take it out of the Scott’s Bluff Post Office and burn it. If I should come back, they’d hang me. They wouldn’t really do it? Oh, yes, they would. Why not? They are above the law. Or rather they make their own law. And if they but build the wall high enough they can keep their women pure and their faithful darkies innocent and childlike.

But the reader learns, as Fiske has learned, that the darkies are not “innocent and childlike” and, as the undercurrent of unrest among the slaves proves, they are not “faithful” either. In effect, the Blacks and whites, who maintain such close daily contact, really live in totally separate worlds. Most of the whites have no understanding of the blacks as they really are. Scofield, the black headman of the Dalton plantation, for example, is the “real boss,” according to Mr. Dalton. Dalton relies on his judgment much more than he does on his white overseer’s. Scofield has learned to play the role that his master expects him to play, but is has nothing to do with the real role that he sees himself assuming one day–that of a modern-day Moses who will lead his captive people out of bondage and into the promised land. Mrs. Gaither’s last novel, Double Muscadine, is the most carefully constructed and suspenseful of all her novels. Perhaps this fact accounts for its being chosen a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1949. More importantly, however, the novel is Mrs. Gaither’s most telling indictment of slavery. The reader witnesses not the economic decline of the plantation, as in Follow the Drinking Gourd, not the threat of a slave rebellion, as in The Red Cock Crows, but the collapse of a family’s inner life. Both Blacks and whites are portrayed objectively. The reader is forced not to make the easy assumption that either group is “responsible” for the deaths and the suffering that occur. The real villain is the system of slavery, the code that the white community blindly accepts and that perverts the best qualities of its members.

One character in Double Muscadine observes that it is the “debasing,” the “undervaluing, of the individual that is the very root and core of the evil of slavery.” Ultimately this is Mrs. Gaither’s position too. She implies that a society’s real strength, its foundation, is its humanity. Without this humanity, this respect for the individual, the society is doomed. Slavery was a denial, or at least an evasion, of this simple reality. It was a lie and, as such, it could do nothing but alienate and isolate the whites, not only from the Blacks but from themselves.

Caroline Gordon was born into the Kentucky line of the extensive Meriwether family in 1895. Exploration of the family’s past and its evolution is a major theme of her fiction. She grew up at Merry Mont in Todd County, near Clarksville. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethany College in 1916.

Gordon taught briefly; then, as a journalist, she became one of the first reviewers to comment favorably on a new Nashville-based magazine of poetry, The Fugitive. During the summer of 1924, Robert Penn Warren, a Todd County neighbor, introduced her to Allen Tate. Within a year they were married and living in New York City, where she gave birth to their daughter, Nancy Meriwether.

In 1930, the Tates settled in Clarksville in a house provided by Tate’s brother, Ben, called Benfolly. Both Tates were exceptionally hospitable to friends and encouraging to younger writers. Both were prolific correspondents, generous with constructive criticism. (Gordon eventually became mentor to several writers, most notably Flannery O’Connor). Although she had to wrest time for her writing from domestic and social obligations, the eight Benfolly years were especially productive for Gordon, who published four novels and several stories before 1937. The first novel was Penhally (1931), followed by Alec Maury, Sportsman (1934), None Shall Look Back (1937), and The Garden of Adonis (1937).

Her second related group of novels, The Woman on the Porch (1944), which deals with a troubled marriage, The Strange Children (1951), based on life at Benfolly, and The Malefactors (1956), is informed by her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Her own marriage suffered during this period. The Tates were divorced briefly in 1946, then remarried. Together they wrote The House of Fiction (1950), which was followed by Gordon’s How to Read a Novel in 1957. The marriage was permanently dissolved in 1959.

 Gordon maintained her home at Princeton until 1973, teaching and writing; works of this time include The Glory of Hera (1972). An appointment in the creative writing program drew her to the University of Dallas. When her health began to fail in 1978, she moved to San Cristobal de las Casas in Chapas, Mexico, with the Wood family. She died there on April 11, 1981.

Tennessee folklorist and humorist Richard M. Gunn, more commonly known as “Pek” Gunn, born in Pinewood in Hickman County, was appointed Poet Laureate of Tennessee in 1971, and held the position until 1994.

Married early to Frances Thompson, he furthered his patronage as a Tennessean. He became a member of ASCAP (American Society Composers, Authors, and Publishers), the Tennessee Folklore Society, and a lifetime member of Alpha Kappa Si fraternity.

He released two books of poetry that successfully depicted the south. Keep on Laughin’ was published in 1963, and Tumblin’ Creek Tales in 1975. His poems can be very nostalgic for a native reader, full of fervent enthusiasm towards Tennessee culture.

A collaboration of his vivid imagery and precise diction provides a sense of culture. Gunn’s usage of traditional southern pronunciations and quirky dialects elicits an inflection of hospitality and depicts the humanity of Southerners, allowing them to shine through his poems.

Part of the territory that goes along with being poet laureate for a state is creating poetry that marks, illuminates, and emphasizes the importance of historical happenings. On March 13, 1975, “Pek” penned a poem in dedication to the bicentennial. “The Tennessee Salute” is a motivational poem referencing economic strengths and portraying the state in a subtle yet, exaggerated complimentary light.

Gunn tied this speech-like poem of dedication to the patriotic tune and revisits the empowering words of “America the Beautiful” through the mention of “fields of grain” and “purple mountains.” The line, “Tennessee, your lakes are playgrounds where the water skiers sway” embellishes the state’s abundant natural resources, bodies of water and agrarian opportunities, and makes them seem like daily adventures for its citizens, rather than a commerce benefit.

“Little Mischief” was written by Gunn when the raccoon was inducted as the official state animal.

His rhythmic phrases have often been called “Gunn shots,” reflecting his quick wit. Gunn’s poems are thought by many to have subtle religious tones. They are not brazenly Christian, but the messages he sends are often encouraging and uplifting.

In From Humble Beginnings: Songs of a Native Son, Frank Andrews, a man who knew “Pek,” dedicated a poem to him for his 80th birthday. Andrews complimented Gunn by saying, “There’ll never be another man whose pen will sing such words.”

Gunn died on February 25, 1995, at 91, of congestive heart failure.